Anything about IT

if you have watched the Windows XP Mode IT Pro Deployment Video, you might be interested in the scripts they’ve used to automatically install XP Mode and create virtual machines. You can download them from here

Usually when you read a Microsoft Knowledge Base article you find a detailed description on how to solve a particular problem.

In some KB articles you will find the following picture

This indicates that the “Fix it Team” has provided a script / package to automate the system modifications required to fix the problem or change the system behavior.

The fix it team has their own “fix it for me blog” where they list the KB articles they have provided a fix it package.

This is primarily useful for users that aren’t familiar with manually changing the system registry etc, but can also be of use for system administrations.

While searching for something I came across the site computer performance, why the sites is called like that, i don’t know, but it has a lot of interesting content related to windows 2008, vista, scripting etc. so that i find it worth mentioning.

http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/index.htm

Today I have come across the topic BITS which stands for Binary Intelligent Transfer Service which is a file transfer technology that is included in Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista.

What is nice about BITS is that it provides Checkpoint recovery and network throttling. This means that when a download is being interrupted because the remote site became temporarily unavailable or you had shut down your client, BITS will automatically resume the download when the remote source becomes available again or when the machine has been powered up again.

If other resources on the system have network activity , BITS automatically adjusts its use of the available network bandwidth.

If you have Windows Update enabled and download your updates from Microsoft or from a local WSUS server, the operating system uses BITS to retrieve the Windows Patch installation sources.

For more information about BITS have a look on Microsoft MSDN.

Before you can use BITS yourself on XP and Server 2003, you must download BITSADMIN.EXE, that is included in the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 32-bit Support Tools. On Windows Vista bitsadmin version 3.0 comes with the OS.

For an overview of all available commands type BITSADMIN /? The syntax is quite straight forward.  Note that as far I know there is no scripting interface for BITS, so you must use the BITSADMIN.EXE tool to perform BITS tasks.

To download Microsoft Windows Automated Installation Kit sources (992 MB) you would enter the following command:

bitsadmin /TRANSFER waikdl http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/6/d/86d6ba9c-98ff-444e-87ed-3e76772eb2a6/vista_6000.16386.061101-2205-LRMAIK_EN.img C:\transfer\waik.img

if you want to monitor any BITS activity on your system then type:

bitsadmin  /MONITOR

If you are sure about what you are doing and you want to speed up the installation of multiple security patches or applications, you can use the following WMI command to disable Windows XP system restore.

on error resume next
set sr=GetObject(“winmgmts:\\.\root\default:SystemRestore”)
e=sr.disable(“”)

To turn on System Restore again, use the following command:

on error resume next
set sr=GetObject(“winmgmts:\\.\root\default:SystemRestore”)
e=sr.enable(“”)

I posted this a couple of years ago into the MyITforum site and received plenty of replies on this, as at that stage it was an unknown trick. Below the trick how to enable the Windows XP quicklaunch bar by using a registry hack.

copy the reg key
“HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\Desktop\Default Taskbar”
to:
“HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\Desktop\Taskbar”
(for XP RTM)
“HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\Desktop\TaskbarWinXP”
(for XP SP1) (to be safe copy it to both locations)